The more scrutiny it is subjected to, the more suspect the motive becomes for proceeding with the hastily-planned referendum on citizenship with the local and European elections on June 11th. The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, first announced his intention to hold a referendum to remove the automatic right to citizenship for children born on the island of Ireland a month ago. It was required, he suggested initially, to curtail the steady flow of non-nationals and asylum-seekers, the number of pregnant "citizenship tourists", causing a crisis in maternity hospitals, particularly in Dublin.
A month later, it is not an issue about the maternity hospitals at all. Mr McDowell has shifted his position. The masters of the main maternity hospitals publicly challenged his claim that they had pleaded for the referendum to control an overcrowding crisis. So the Minister now asserts that the referendum is necessary to "protect the integrity of the Irish citizenship law". It is a fact that Ireland has the most liberal citizenship regime in Europe today.
Beyond that, the Minister refuses to make a coherent case for a referendum on the most fundamental issue: what it is to be Irish today. The opposition parties, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, are cowed lest they are caught on the wrong side of a silent, but potentially racist, card in the local and European elections. They fear the smear tactics of the abortion referendum of the 1980s. It is left to the smaller parties to raise the substantive questions.
And there are difficult issues at stake which should challenge our comfort zones. Mr McDowell's proposal may be popular. It may appeal to the lowest base instincts. But there is a sense of deep unease that the scale of the citizenship abuse may not be commensurate with a hurried change to the Constitution. No figures are being provided by Mr McDowell about the number of "citizenship tourists" exploiting Irish citizenship laws to gain access, through a child born in Ireland, to European Union-wide rights. Voters are being asked to vote on instinct, rather than real information.
What is most perturbing, however, is that the Government is prepared to damage the authority of the Belfast Agreement in order to proceed with the citizenship referendum in June. The Government will argue that it is not changing Article 2 of the Constitution, which replaced the territorial claim on Northern Ireland. But it is tempering the effect of the new Article in a clear breach of the spirit, if not the letter, of the referendum in 1998. It is not surprising that the SDLP leader, Mr Mark Durkan, would express his "profound concern" to the Taoiseach about this development. It undermines the architecture and authority of the Belfast Agreement in the midst of the debate between the Democratic Unionist Party and the nationalist parties as to whether it is open for renegotiation or review.
The Belfast Agreement cannot become the pawn of the local elections. This referendum must be postponed.